W&M April Admission Letters

Colleges and Universities A-Z College of William and Mary
181

<p>It sounds like some of these schools need an “Undercover Boss” day. </p>

<p>My D applied to schools based on their music programs, and I must say, we didn’t meet a single rude person in admissions along the way. Both students and professionals were courteous and never made my D or me feel unimportant. She has been at her current school for 2 years and I have yet to meet anyone on staff who has not been pleasant and accommodating. No matter the time of year or how busy they are, they have been patient and helpful. </p>

<p>Schools need to pay attention to those who are on the front lines - tour guides, admissions and financial aid staff, etc.</p>

182

<p>Daughter 2 gave up her “dream” school, inpart, to the lousy tour guide. She wanted to separate the kids from the parents to let them ask the REAL questions…what drugs were available on campus. I did notify the school the reasons why daughter was turning down their more than generous offer.</p>

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<p>Soccerguy315</p>

<p>Everything you reflected on is your opinion, no more or less.</p>

<p>You don’t know anything for certain based on your comments and some of them are actually inconsistent with published reports and my recent experience" Lower tier schools can offer merit money based on scores. Top schools cannot do that…" How do you think W&M, UVA, W&L etc pick thier scholar program candidates, the unique essays? My daughter didn’t get four Presidential Scholarships from “lower tier” schools based on her boards. </p>

<p>For the nth time its not about my daughters admission (we always knew this was a stretch school based on scores), its about the image created by that crazy ole admissions staff, (what a madcap bunch of screwballs) and the reality of their admissions decisions. They have too many applications and too few slots to be pretend to be fair if they take a “holistic” approach. You can only, at the end of the day lean heavily on the std test scores. While the sliver of kids who are admitted below the std test mean meet either social policy or athletic objectives or; if they are females, white and middle class might as well be lottery winners. The admission staff shouldn’t fool themselves that they are agonizing over picking just the right “quirky” candidate. </p>

<p>At the end of the day there is no way I should be spending this much energy on this and there is no way my comments can be read as other than sour grapes. </p>

<p>But I must say, based on your note, W&M tuned your arrogance to a fair degree.</p>

<p>No more from me so you can have the last word although I will never read it.</p>

184

<p>Honestly I find Sallies quite humorous. </p>

<p>Top schools don’t offer scholarships based on scores because…drum roll…they already have a crapload of applicants with stellar scores! The way the SAT works is that missing 2 math problems sets you down to 760 and 3 down to 710ish. Giving out a bunch of money to someone who got 1-2 more math problems correct on a Saturday morning is not how merit aid works (at top schools). They honestly do award scholarships based primarily on EC because they already have a bunch of applicants with a 4.2+ and 2100+ SAT. The way you differentiate yourself is through your essay and your EC. W&M could easily fill a class with 1350+ average SAT students in a heartbeat but you’d lose out many other important factors (course rigor, circumstances, experience with life/perspective, essays, internships etc.).
Which applicant is more impressive?
Sat: 2200
GPA 4.2
Interned at multiple hospitals, graduated from HS at the age of 16, 300 hours of community service at hospitals, tons of clubs, state champion in pole-vaulting, national recognition for violin playing.
OR
SAT:
2400
GPA 4.4
no EC, maybe a few clubs.
The choice is obvious. With so many people getting high SAT scores in the applicant pool, a slightly higher SAT or even a perfect one is irrelevant. 2400 to 2200 or 2100 is 6-9 problems out of a hundred or two. This is hardly relevant to the admissions process.
W&M like any competitive school HAS to look past the SAT scores and GPA because both of those become irrelevant past a certain point. </p>

<p>“While the sliver of kids who are admitted below the std test mean meet either social policy or athletic objectives…”
LOL. The way scores are reported 25% score below a 1270 and still get in. I wouldn’t call 25% a sliver by any means.</p>

<p>I am definitely annoyed by the recent call for racial diversity over socioeconomic or diversity in other areas but W&M is probably the least racially diverse school I can think of off the top of my head. With a whopping 60% of W&M students being white and the census being 65% white it’s hard to call W&M out for favoring URM too much. In fact if you compare the W&M demographics to the US population W&M has fewer Blacks, fewer Whites and more Asians than you would expect (assuming equality among races). However as we all know Asians tend to be more impressive and dominate top universities compared to Whites/Blacks so they logically are overrepresented at universities. I don’t see why this is a bad thing. Note that the above include 16.5% who decline to state. </p>

<p>It is true as a female your D did face tougher competition, but they do this for logical reasons. Having a huge disparity between the sexes makes the school less appealing for prospective students and as a result, lowers the quality of the pool of applicants W&M can choose from. Your D also is from Virginia so that sort of nullifies the potential anti-hook (OOS is harder obviously.)</p>

<p>As for W&M getting state funding yeah, they do. all ~14% of it, decreasing every year. How long you expect W&M to be public at this rate? At around 10% I definitely see W&M going private; there have already been some discussions on how that would be done if necessary. Recently at UVA they are already starting to go pseudo private. In-state tuition for med school is only 10k difference (35k vs. 45k) and at their law school (39k vs. 49k). W&M is already shockingly good value (compared to many other top colleges like the UC system which is now 30k+ and increasing 1-3k a year) for in-state students and OOS it’s a good deal too, although more in-line with market value (40k vs. 50k+ for privates). </p>

<p>If you are applying to a school with significantly lower scores than their average admit you need to really have a good hook to show why you are worth accepting. 25%+ got in with a score under your D’s, they had something the admissions committee were looking for that your D didn’t have. Holistic admissions =/= we’ll admit your daughter.</p>

<p>Your last comment on the first post is hilarious:
“So when the PolySci majors get out of W&M looking for jobs or their parents to pay for grad school, she will be on track to be a Doctor of Physical Therapy and have a profession within two years.”
Interesting point. And while your daughter is working as a Physical Therapist some W&M students will be making 2x as much as surgeons. How is this relevant?
Competitive schools are competitive. Sorry you took your D’s rejection so personally.
I’d like to echo many others and say I found admissions staff to be very friendly when I visited.</p>

185

<p>My final note on this thread…and then I am done. If admissions does NOT take a certain amount of quirkyness into account, why is there more diversity on WM’s campus than just about any other campus in the state? I do not mean racially. Drive through UVA, JMU, VT, ODU, RU, etc, and truly, a vast majority of the students look the same…college hoodies. Jeans. Other than VCU, where else did I regularly see a student with a green mohawk? One sees individual’s on the campus, not just coeds. Felt this way the first time on campus and three years later, still present. Just one of the charms of WM; it’s quirkiness.</p>

186

<p>Sallies is no longer reading this thread, so I don’t know why I’m bothering with a response. But I would not draw the conclusion that W & M admissions are not “quirky,” or holistic, or the result of effort/skill, because one instate student with lower than the school’s average standardized test scores was not accepted. Nor would I draw that conclusion based on the smattering of “evidence” she has posted here, including admissions results at other schools and a conversation with an admissions counselor at another institution.</p>

187

<p>I read this discussion with interest and not a small amount of disappointment in the way some posters reacted to Sallies’ experience. On the off chance that Sallies is still reading, I’d like to apologize for the way that some responded to her, and to say that those posters are neither representative of W&M students, parents, or alumni as a whole, nor should their thoughts be given any more or less weight than anyone else’s. </p>

<p>While I didn’t agree with a lot of Sallies’ complaints or reasoning, she did raise a very interesting point about the admissions game. I think we can all agree that the selectivity of a school is tied quite closely to its reputation and prestige; selectivity also factors into the US News rankings, which, grudgingly or not, W&M continues to participate in. By encouraging more students to apply, a school can very quickly and easily lower its acceptance rate. I assume the qualified students all have a pretty good idea who they are, so it’s the marginal candidate, for whom W&M would quantitatively be a reach, that represents the biggest “market” for the holistic admissions sales pitch. </p>

<p>And now that the College’s announcement of a record number of applications has become an annual one, there’s quite a bit of pressure to maintain that trend. It may very well be that W&M is simply paying lip service to the more-than-just-numbers review process in order to boost application numbers. Personally, I find the videos and blogs a little ingratiating, and the yearly “look how interesting our incoming class is: we’ve got an elephant tamer, an ultramarathoner, an orphanage founder, a rodeo clown, a quadralingual ballet dancer, a lemonade stand tycoon, and patent holder for an obscure device!” is a bit solipsistic for my taste (ironic, I know, considering the length of this post), but whatever, I’m not the target audience. It’s impossible to know just how holistic the process is without having seen all the applications, and none of the anecdotal evidence given in this thread, by Sallies or by her opposition, even comes close to being a representative sample. </p>

<p>In the end, it’s not necessarily mutually exclusive. W&M probably does try to account for as much about an applicant as it can, and it also probably does broadcast this very loudly to encourage more people to apply. Every class needs that quadralingual ballet dancer, doesn’t it? And the bigger the applicant pool is, the better the chances for finding her.</p>

<p>Finally, how about a moratorium on “quirky” until next year?</p>

188

<p>hxsux, I have no idea whether you’ve included me in those posters whose responses you believe require an apology. You may have, since I was among those who objected to Sallies’ points about W & M’s admissions policies. Having re-read the relevant pages, I see very little rudeness in response to Sallies’ posts, and none from the parent posters here. Unless it’s rude to disagree? I note that Sallies’ own posts contain hostility (she introduced the “smarmy and self-indulgent” description), particularly the following statement:

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<p>As to the posters on this thread not being representative of W & M “students, parents, or alumni as a whole,” I’ll admit I have no idea what you mean. Are we supposed to be? How should we have responded in order to be “representative”? </p>

<p>I can live with a moratorium on “quirky.” Can we have a moratorium on apologizing for other posters, too, unless those posters are out of compliance with the board TOS?</p>

189

<p>I definitely concur with frazzled1. I don’t see the posts responding to her as very rude at all, and certainly not as rude as the jab at potential poly sci majors at W&M/W&M admissions staff. Some of her info was just flat out wrong (a sliver being below the average, when by definition 25% are below the listed number etc.) I think you can definitely get a feel of the holistic admissions when looking at the admissions threads. usually you have 100-200 applications to view which may not be perfectly representative, but they definitely show a trend.
Quite a few people posted 4.3-4.4 GPA with 2250+ SAT, yet many including myself got in with lower stats. Yes, it does help W&M to have more people apply, but if they’re rejecting people with SAT/GPA ranges above the average they are definitely drawing on other criteria. W&M could also increase its ranking by not admitting anyone with lower than 1300 SAT. They’d definitely shoot up a few spots in the USNWR rankings, but at the cost of what makes W&M, W&M. </p>

<p>Note: While I don’t appreciate USNWR in general, it can be a valuable tool. I found W&M through the USNWR rankings. I never received any mail urging me to apply or anything like that, something extremely selective colleges like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and definitely Chicago are guilty of. While I might have had a chance at Chicago HYP were not even reaches, they were just trying to decrease their acceptance rate.</p>

190

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<p>not really. I said:</p>

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<p>FACT.</p>

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<p>FACT.</p>

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<p>Yes, obviously the students with merit aid have good scores and GPAs, but there are tons of students with good scores and GPAs who do not have merit aid. Therefore, FACT.</p>

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<p>again… FACT.</p>

<p>So, it looks like… every single thing in my post was a fact.</p>

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<p>Why do you continue to insult members of the William and Mary community for no apparent reason? Well, there is one apparent reason, that your daughter got rejected, but you continually say that that piece of information has no impact on your feelings. I’m sure you would be making the exact same postings on this message board if she were accepted… right?</p>

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<p>No. W&M does not just make the decisions on test scores. This is well documented, in writing, and publicly released. There was a huge article on admissions at W&M in the alumni magazine in the last couple years. It has been posted on this board multiple times. I guess it makes you feel better if you think all the kids with SAT scores lower than your daughter that got accepted are poor black kids. But I guarantee you that is not true. </p>

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<p>Because your comments are backed up with hatred instead of facts.</p>

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<p>Perhaps you could point me to the arrogant things that I posted? But, you probably cannot, because I have posted no such thing. I do not understand what I did to deserve the extreme hatred that you are throwing my way. But, just so you know, I can happily be a huge dbag just like you, so I leave you with this:</p>

<p>I wish your daughter the best of luck in life. But as for you, if your posts on this board are an accurate representation of you as a person, I don’t think anyone would be sad if you got hit and killed by a car tomorrow. Or mauled by a Griffin.</p>

191

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<p>actually… she didn’t raise anything interesting at all. Unless you think that “some people with higher scores get rejected and some people with lower scores get in” is interesting. Personally, I file that into the “duh” category.</p>

<p>I will not apologize for anything I said in this thread. Including the mean comment I made at the end of my previous post. I am a very happy person and love to help people or offer what advice I can to help them make their decisions. But I have no problem with being an ******* if someone else dishes it out first (as I did to another parent, possibly in this same thread).</p>

<p>My posts do not need a disclaimer either.</p>

192

<p>Ok - funny story - and my last word on this thread.</p>

<p>So there I am at Admitted Students day. Toward the end of the initial presentations at W & M Hall they introduce the rising seniors from last summer’s prospective student interviews. I don’t think anything of it. They each introduce themselves. Hi my name is ____ and I am from <strong><em>. The 2nd to last student does his introduction - Hi my name is </em></strong> and I am from South Dakota. I nearly fell off my seat!!!. THAT’s the student who interviewed SALLIES kid!!! Coincidentally the same student led a tour later in the day in which my D and I participated. I must say that this senior was, as one might expect from a student who donates his time to give tours, conduct summer interviews etc., a personable, approachable and sincerely interested person. He was a fine example for W & M. As if he needed further proof of his general caring nature - after graduation thiis South Dakotan will be participating in YouthTeach in Baltimore, MD. 'nuff said.</p>

193

<p>Correction - TeachforAmerica in Baltimore, MD</p>